The scope of the paper is to show that congruence of opinions occurs in transitional democracies but that citizens’ influence on the party preference is strongly mediated by the perception of party about the preferences of citizens. The second objective is to show that issues considered more important by both citizens and parties reveal better congruence scores indicating the presence of political representation. Democratic political systems include political representation as a decision-making tool legitimated by citizens. The concerns drawn from this method lead to the creation of norm every democracy considers essential: That people’s preferences should be taken into account in national decision-making. Several use congruence to measure the degree of influence on the elected representatives by congruence of opinions. This approach is especially fruitful in contexts in which institutions are new and rules have not been internalized. This is the approach that is useful in the context of transition to democracy in two Eastern European countries: Hungary and Poland. Following Miller and Stokes and Achen there will be an attempt for analyzing voter sophistication before engaging in studies of congruence. The test becomes more important in new democracies like Hungary and Poland in which party system instability was high. The second step is to analyze the influence of voters’ preferences over parties and representatives mediated by the perception of the party representatives on the left right axis and several issues considered important for the Polish and Hungarian politics at the end of 90ies. Availability of data permits testing the same arguments longitudinally for Poland by comparing the mass elite survey of 1998 with those of 2008. The expectation is that the degree of citizens’ sophistication the degree of congruence between citizens and representatives would increase as the country consolidates its democratic institutions. The data used are a citizen-MP survey implemented in 1998 in Hungary, and two citizen-MP surveys applied in 1997 and 2002 in Poland.
